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Akter Cloud hosts your Akter app on managed runners. You supply Postgres for every environment on every plan; Akter does not provision or bill for databases. You upload source with the CLI, and the platform builds it, applies migrations to your database and rolls out runners. You can also self-host Akter.

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Sign up

  1. Open the Akter Cloud console. Enter your name, email and a password of at least 12 characters, and accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
  2. Open the verification link sent to your email address. A verified account is required to use the Cloud API and approve CLI login.
  3. Follow onboarding to name your organization and create your first project. Organizations own projects, members and billing; projects contain environments and deployments.
  4. Keep your project’s ID for --project, or set AKTER_PROJECT in your shell. The CLI needs the ID, not the project name or slug.
Start with the available home region. Adding a second region is not part of the launch offering.

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Install the CLI

The package is @rikalabs/akter-cli; its executable is akter. It supports Bun 1.4.2+ or Node 24+. Use the alpha dist-tag for both packages: @rikalabs/akter-cli@alpha for the CLI and @rikalabs/akter@alpha for your app, as in the quickstart. The framework’s latest tag may still point to an older alpha.
login prints a browser URL and an eight-character code. Open that URL, sign in and approve the matching code. Wait for the CLI to confirm that it saved your credentials. Never share the code or credential file. For a preview or another control plane, use its API URL explicitly:
The flag is --api-url, not --api. AKTER_API_URL also selects the API for login. Otherwise, login uses https://api.akter.dev. Subsequent commands use the API saved by login, not a newly changed AKTER_API_URL. Remote APIs must use HTTPS; HTTP is accepted only for loopback hosts.
whoami prints your email, organization slugs, roles and organization IDs. Credentials are stored in the platform’s configuration directory; AKTER_CONFIG_DIR overrides that location. On macOS the default is ~/Library/Application Support/akter. Do not commit this directory.

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Connect Postgres before deploying

Choose a Postgres near the runners in Fly iad / AWS us-east-1, then set its direct connection URL as DATABASE_URL in each environment you will deploy. This is required on Free, Pro, Team and Enterprise. Transaction-pooler URLs are refused; a deploy-time p50 latency above 5 ms warns but does not block deployment. Next, deploy your app and review compute-only pricing and limits. You own the database’s capacity, backups and provider bill, and Akter never deletes it. See environment variables for your other configuration.

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Sign out

This attempts to sign out the stored CLI session and removes its local credentials. If the API cannot revoke the session, the CLI warns that it remains valid until expiry. Logout does not delete your account, organization or deployments.